Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental. Names, characters, places, and incidents, are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018, Hesse Caplinger

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Editor’s Foreword Copyright © 2018, Matthew Marx

  Contents

  Editor’s Foreword

  2005

  I.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  II.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  III.

  IV.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  2.

  3.

  VIII.

  2.

  3.

  IX.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  X.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  XI.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  XII.

  XIII.

  2.

  XIV.

  2.

  XV.

  XVI.

  Editor’s Foreword

  Equipment is a novel primarily about men. The characters are flawed, some more obviously so than others, with some blissfully, if mortally, unaware of these defining features. Whether or not these flaws determine or contribute to the mistakes these characters make is an open question, but the consequences are significant and often final, for themselves and others. There are no heroes here, only those—like Marek Hussar or The Familiar—who wield power. Some—like Howard Charles Foster—struggle to wield power even over themselves. The collective effect is a palpable tension between the characters, each acting in accordance with their nature, stature, and position, and few, it seems, operating with a full awareness of their own flawed psychologies. Beneath the surface is a chilling reflection of male isolation in a transactional world.

  In the many years I have known Hesse Caplinger, for causes known and imagined, he grew up earlier than the rest of us and seemed unchildlike even as a child. He has always been a keen observer of psychology and culture. The intensity of the writing is a direct reflection of the intensity of the author. He can be particular in the extreme, and as a consequence, occasionally challenging for reader and editor alike. The act of creation begins with the self; the philosophies, tastes, and preferences, however particular, and the product—if indeed there is such an independent thing—exists here as an intersectional examination of quality: masculinity, dignity, morality, and self-determination. The creation of a man, like the creation of art, is deliberate and careful.

  Jazz music is a prominent ingredient of Equipment, not just to describe the preferences and sophistication of the characters, but as a reflection of the writing style itself. Improvisational techniques are a feature of this novel with its complex sentence structures, its rhythmic use of advanced punctuation, and its evocative descriptions to create a music—singular and cohesive—meant to simultaneously please and challenge the audience. Moreover, the effect is intensity, often—and oxymoronically—understated intensity, usually divulging a character’s inner life, psychology, and motivations that are revealed slowly through action; there is a delicate balance between what is vividly described and what is subtly intimated.

  In consideration of what constitutes a literary novel, most readers anticipate that the work reflects an elevated artistry, manifested intellectually, spiritually, or stylistically. While no formula for exact definitions and genres need necessarily exist for art—nor indeed should exist for art—approaching an understanding can prove useful: Is this a literary novel, in that it is serious and makes intellectual demands of the reader? Is this a spy novel—like those of Greene, Fleming, or le Carré—in which espionage plays a central role? Is it a thriller? Certainly, although the thrills often come through revelations implied by the author and awakened within the reader, who must read closely: the vocabulary, punctuation, syntax, characterization, and nonlinear plot create a borderless puzzle that only emerges through working the pieces together and realizing—with trepidation turned delight—that some are intentionally missing. Understandably, we judge writing based on what we have previously read and then try to nestle the current work into this mold. So much depends on our expectations: as with most great art, the flickering disappointment when our expectations are unfulfilled and the rising joy when they are replaced with something new and better.

  Equipment presents a looping journey into the machinations of serious people engaging in serious endeavors. As a spy thriller, the book has all the appropriate elements: espionage, seduction, gunplay, car chases, shadowy figures, and mysteries. As a work of literature, it succeeds in the execution of its prose, giving the right weight to each carefully-considered word rendered in deliberate rhythm—the effect of which is, in a word, intense.

  Matthew Marx

  University of Nebraska

  December 2018

  For Eva

  In Memory of

  Glenn Savan

  and

  Dick Colloton

  2005

  August bore a tender bruise on his cheek and a livid mar at the cleave of his right ear; it was dressed and taped and he pressed it from time to time softly with the palm of his hand. August and Kyle Lewis, and Phillip and Edmund LeFrance had shouldered the reluctant skid of a door and mounted the stair of the vacant apartment house at the verge of Nebraska and Keokuk and now waited together on the second floor. It was a 9:00 a.m. meet now waxing 9:43, and August was tired and scuffed and cross with impatience, and running an appetite. He paced about the small kitchen peppered in mouse droppings and Borax dust, and was tentatively cupping at his ear when Phillip called to him from the front room.

  “Say again,” he said, leaving Kyle Lewis in his place. Phillip was looking up the block through a window and LeFrance was working the fold on a hand-rolled cigarette.

  “I said: ‘He in a Mercedes?’” repeated Phillip, peering south out over the shuttered service station on the next lot.

  “No. Why?” asked August.

  “There’s a black one next block up. It’s running—I can see exhaust,” he said.

  August looked, and Phillip looked, and LeFrance lit his cigarette and looked.

  “No,” repeated August. “Suburban, I expect.”

  “Maybe he’s a no-show,” said Phillip, and August wondered if it were true.

  They all came away from the window.

  LeFrance said, “I’ve got a piss to mark the occasion,” and shuffled off toward the short hall.

  “Hey, what occasion?” August called after him.

  “Pissing, August,” said LeFrance from the threshold. He pinched a tobacco grain from his lip. “You took a pretty good clout on that ear.”

  “Don’t—not in there,” said August.

  “You want me to put it in the sink?”

  “Put it in a bottle, LeFrance—we’re leaving in a minute—you put it in there you may as well leave it in a labeled tube.”

  “Probably four hobos a day climb up here and leave samples,” said LeFrance, and turned through the second room. “Too
much coffee, August,” LeFrance called to him, his voice now distant and porcelain-shrill. “Just a pick-up, man. Right? Payday simple. Right?”

  “Cautious man leads a long life, LeFrance,” August barked, and dispelled the subject with an irritable flick of his wrist.

  They heard the bathroom door shunt and rattle, nearly closed against the sloped floor. “That Socrates?” came the faint sound of LeFrance.

  “What’d he say?” August asked Phillip.

  Phillip chuckled lightly.

  Kyle Lewis, who had been quietly watching the alley from the kitchen at the back, called out, “What’d he say?”

  “Confucius!” announced Phillip.

  “Confusion,” August thought he heard someone say, probably LeFrance.

  “Ben fucking Franklin!” roared August. “Now shut up!”

  August returned to the front window, and they were still for a while. “Why’d you pick this place?” asked Phillip. He’d been walking the grain of the floorboards and paused, as though stalled on a balance beam, to deliver his question.

  “I didn’t,” replied August. “If I’d picked—” he said, but he was interrupted by a sound that was faceted and simultaneous: of fractured glass, a loud knock which rattled the apartment with the weight of a twenty pound hammer strike, and a sound which hung in the air, like the snap of a bullwhip cut from wire band.

  August and Phillip were quiet and strained with their eyes to listen.

  “Where was that?” asked Phillip.

  “The back,” said August, “the kitchen.”

  They listened again.

  “Kyle?” Phillip called back. “Kyle?”

  “Wait,” August said to Phillip as he started toward the back. But as he passed into the window light of the second room his head evaporated in heavy mist, the interior wall exploded with plaster dust, and Phillip collapsed with the improbable postures of a marionette. In the same instant, the report of the metallic bullwhip rang out, and August flickered at the knees and sat sharply on the floor. He drew the pistol from his jacket and rest it on his leg, but against his grip it felt formidable as a worry stone.

  The building shook with two blows in quick succession. The first sounded of masonry and thick porcelain shards and put a shaft of light through the bathroom door onto the hall. The second resounded with the cast-iron inflection of a stricken tub and skittering debris.

  The wall to his left was solid and windowless, but it opened at the far end with a hole waist high that blew wood lathe and brick meal, plaster fume and light everywhere into the space. A second passed, and one after another then, holes opened every two and a half feet toward him along the same horizon, showering brick and light and dust.

  I.

  Charles Foster offered no acknowledgment when Jeffrey Sachs had been seated. Instead, apparently immersed, he continued in reading and occasionally typing messages on his phone. In fact it wasn’t until Sachs began craning round in search of wait staff that Foster greeted him at all.

  It was early evening February when the pair met at the back of Blueberry Hill. Foster was making the unusual great length of him comfortable, his knees jutted beneath the table for fit, and splay either direction along the bench of the high booth. The two had met on several occasions, however Sachs had taken to hoping that few such meetings remained. American blues played over the din, and an amber light—imparting the outdoors an illusion of warmth it did not have—lapped at the capstones of buildings across Delmar and settled through the large window nearby. For a narrow space of time Sachs observed this light and it gave him a feeling as though the high-stain and wear-scarred angles of the booth were like the enclosure of a four-place shriving pew: economy class. It was a mood which struck briefly and passed, where it was replaced instead by an impulse for beer, if for no purpose but the chance to improve Foster’s company by it.

  “It’s still early—they should be by in a minute,” said Foster, still arrested in the small green light of his phone.

  “I know,” said Sachs. “But I don’t feel like waiting.” He craned around again and began to stand.

  “They’ll be by in a minute,” Foster repeated.

  “That’s alright—want a beer?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Right. Anything while I’m up?”

  “No,” was Foster’s uninflected reply.

  Jeffrey Sachs was a graduate student in computer science—jeans, cowboy boots, and a formless woolen coat—who some four semesters prior had taken ‘Engineering Real-Time Systems: Theory and Practice’ from Foster, most commonly from his graduate assistant. It was apart from Sachs’ major in programming languages, but was nevertheless an interest, and satisfied one of several School of Engineering and Applied Sciences requirements. In fact, though little of the rhetorical theater of the course now replayed for Sachs with any narrative coherence, still the image of the over-tall Foster teetering excitedly around the lecture hall like a circus performer on stilts, burping out phrases—‘duality and optimization,’ ‘min-max equals max-min,’ ‘quadratic,’ and ‘game theory’—as though the words themselves were imbued with the power of their own meaning, and all the while gesticulating in that slow-motion manner of the very tall. He’d been impressed more with Foster’s air of ill-defined ideological entrenchment and considerable self-approval than by any other particular of the man. Otherwise the class had gone off as well as might be expected, unmoving subject matter and boorish instructor not withstanding. Sachs, to his knowledge, had demonstrated no care beyond the usual, and Foster, no special interest either way—and for this and his work Sachs completed the course to the award of a lowish and slightly soggy ‘A.’ For a time the simplicity of this arrangement persisted: matriculation in its natural state. Weeks later however, and seemingly at random, the two met again at the threshold of Graham Chapel.

  It was the preceding January following a lecture, ‘Ethics and Security in The Digital Space,’ that Foster, crouched upon a bench near the heavy doors had seemed spontaneously to recognize him from the crowd. Three-day-old snow lay everywhere daytime shade prevailed. Flurries danced in the changing motion of the air. It was cold. And Foster, draped in his heavy hunting coat and boots, chatted Sachs cordially—and with the casual familiarity which holds between comrades—all the cobblestone paths back through the portal of Brookings Hall; the descent of the long stair to the lots where they both were parked. Until, with no clear idea why, Jeffrey Sachs found he’d agreed to a lunch, with Foster.

  2.

  In Washington, H. Charles Foster, PhD, had visited with his separated wife and his infant daughter. The girl had writhed and hollered when he held her, and her mother had snatched the child away as though the reaction belonged to some premeditation on his part. The entire apartment seemed done in a singular palette of virginal white, and the living room was crowded with a fresh sofa set in overstuffed linen he understood he’d purchased with the currency of her discontent. For a moment he considered the likely volume of that currency, the reservoir of that disaffection, until he felt a sharp pain in the sinuses behind his eyes, and dabbed his nostril with a tissue from his breast pocket. Catherine, his wife, held the cloying child and spoke to him over the arm of a matching chair. He sat on the sofa in an ill-fitting suit and salmon cuffs and collar. His hands wedged numbly beside his legs. But from where his gaze fell he could make out only the sound of her voice over a soiled footprint in the form of his shoe, which lay opposite the coffee table.

  She was saying she couldn’t be happy with him, she had realized. That little frail Pauline deserved a more dutiful and present father. And that she needed—they needed—to be back in D.C. near her family and her friends, of course. The words at first came to him as through a bowl of water, but at last he’d risen from the hollow of a sparkling stillness and spared the shoe print to look at her. In the enormous chair Catherine looked small, like a child pacifyi
ng a doll. And as Foster observed this, he observed also the lack of demonstrable conflict. There’d been no revelation—no grand reckoning. However ham-fisted or absent, neither had ever mattered. She’d married his family through him, and through them exhausted his usefulness. How long she’d have played along he couldn’t say. He tried to guess it in her expression as she spoke. In the end, he felt convinced, it was as simple as that she hadn’t required him since their wedding day, and certainly since he’d armed her with the child. And she wouldn’t suffer another day in the dreary town at the bend in the river. She didn’t need to. His reassignment to Saint Louis had been for her the beginning and the end. This is what Foster thought as she spoke. And when he stood on the stoop at last to leave she said, “Oh wait,” and after a moment reappeared with a stainless folding knife. “Here,” she said, “you said it was supposed to be good, but it’s broken.” He opened it and examined its badly bent tip.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “One day when the nurse was off, like today, the lid on one of Pauline’s food jars was stuck. I couldn’t find anything to open it.”

  “You tried to open a jar of baby food with this?”

  “You always said it was a good knife.”

  “So you took it?”

  “You said it was a good knife. But it’s not, look at it.”

  “That’s not what it’s for.”

  “You said it was a good utility knife—what’s it supposed to be for then?”

  “That’s not what it’s for. You’re lucky you didn’t cut your hand off.”

  “How could it do that, it couldn’t even loosen the cap on a jar of baby food?”

  He moved down a step and shook his head at the knife in his hand. “That’s not what it’s for.”

  “Well it’s broken, you can take it with you. Maybe you can have it fixed—and maybe then it’ll be more utilitarian.”

  “I can’t take it on the plane.”

  “Well, it’s broken—check it—I don’t care what you do with it.”